Weekly Focus: Hungary, Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria

Week #5 in the CEE Spring 2017 is dedicated to topics related to Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia and Hungary. All the three countries contain in their lists some fascinating topics of general and specialized interest, that are worth featuring in every language version of Wikipedia.

Among the most popular articles from Hungary’s list is the one about the movie “Son of Saul“, already existing in 11 of the 29 languages that take part in this year’s contest. The 2015 drama, set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, won multiple film festival awards including the Grand Prix in Cannes, the Golden Glove for Best Foreign language film, and most notably the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards. Expectedly, another article that exists in multiple languages (12 only from the CEE region) is the article about the University of Debrecen, the oldest institution of higher education in Hungary that has been in continuous operation ever since 1538. And one of the must-read articles from the Hungarian list comes from the “Politics” category and it’s the article about the Hungarian Two-tailed Dog Party, a joke political party, officially registered in 2014. Read more about the gravely serious promises they have made in their election campaigns, and what is the reason the party has adopted this carefully considered highbrow name.

Republic of Macedonia this year organized its list of articles in 12 categories, including the truly fascinating “People from CEE descent who were born/lived in Macedonia”. The category contains a representative mix of people from Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish and Ukrainian descents and captures the true spirit of the CEE Spring contest aimed at showing the ties that keep us together. The most popular article from the list, existing in 17 CEE languages, is the biography of Esma Redžepova – singer, songwriter and humanitarian of Romani ethnicity. Nicknamed the Queen of the Gypsies, her career spanned over five decades. If you are a nature fan, you might be interested to read the article about the impressive Korab waterfall, and make it available to other nature fans from your Wikipedia to read it. And if you are a good cook, you may try to prepare at home the traditional Macedonian dish “tavče gravče“, which has local variants in Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, as well. The article already exists in no less than 9 participating languages, but if you don’t have it in yours you may first want to translate it before reaching out for the pan. This is a good starting point for ideas not only for new articles, but also for new kitchen experiments.

And finally, let’s have a look in the list of 100 articles related to Bulgaria, which yours truly happens to be most familiar with. 🙂 The list contains a separate section with 10 notable women, three of which are the internationally renowned Bulgarian opera divas Ghena Dimitrova, Raina Kabaivanska and Anna Tomowa-Sintow, whose articles exist in as few as 8, 6 and 4 CEE languages, respectively. Another article that currently only exists in 4 participating languages is about the Balkan mountain locality called Uzana. Apart from being a notable yet relatively less popular mountain winter resort, it deserves wider attention for being the place where the geographic centre of Bulgaria has been calculated to lie. And finally, a topic from the “Nature / Geography” category, which you would also like to have in your language, is the article about the rock phenomenon Pobiti Kamani – the only desert-like formation in Bulgaria and one of the few found in Europe. In the wiki universe, the place gained certain popularity in 2016, when a photo from there was selected in the international stage of the “Wiki Loves Earth” contest and ranked second (and, funnily, it only made it fifth in the national stage of the competition!)

Have fun reading and creating in your language these and many more articles about Hungary, Macedonia and Bulgaria!

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